StartupBus Picks Two Winners: WalkIN, TripMedi Nab Top Honors

WalkIN team members (left to right) user interface designer Alex King, business director Bhavin Shah and iOS developer Jesse Ditson jump out of their seats when the judges announce the winners of the StartupBus competition.

Fear and Coding on the StartupBus: Wired.com reporter Keith Axline was embedded on a StartupBus bound for the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. It was one of six such buses filled with coders competing to turn bright ideas into startup prototypes during the 48-hour road trip. The buses have arrived at SXSW, but the journey continues.

[eventbug id=”sxsw2011″]AUSTIN, Texas — WalkIN, the team that cooked up a restaurant app in two days aboard a StartupBus barreling toward Texas, and TripMedi, which built a sort of “Yelp for medical tourism,” have taken top honors in the second annual StartupBus competition.

It was a hung jury, so the StartupBus judges decided Monday night to have the two teams share the top title. I’ve been embedded with the WalkIN team for the past week, covering the crazy coding contest for Wired.com.

When the judges named our restaurant-line–management app one of the winners in the high-mileage hackathon, members of our group jumped out of their seats, screaming indecipherably and hugging any teammate they could grab.

Enthusiasm quickly turned to extreme relief as days of mind-squishing stress and concentration spent creating WalkIN on the StartupBus melted away in an ooze of heady disbelief.

“I want something that will shut down my everything,” said WalkIN team member Jesse Ditson. “I just want to be useless for a while.”

The naming of the two winning teams capped nearly a week of nonstop effort by StartupBus participants, whose trips to South by Southwest Interactive consisted of brainstorming, coding and hammering out business plans that could be turned into working prototypes by the time the vehicles arrived in Austin. It was a herculean effort on the part of the 160 riders on six buses in the competition’s second year.

New York team TripMedi brings it in for a group hug after being named co-winners of the StartupBus competition.

TripMedi, a team from the New York startup bus, delivered an extremely strong presentation of the team’s plan to build a service that will help people who need expensive surgery locate cheap, reliable doctors around the world.

“People might fault me for being arrogant,” said TripMedi backend developer Mike Caprio, “but I really felt strongly about our idea and knew we’d make it to the finals and that we would win.”

“We did what we needed to do,” added Ravi Kotecha, another backend developer (using Python and Jango) for TripMedi.

Prizes in this year’s competition include dinner with VCs from Polaris Venture Partners, hosting from Heroku, online accounting services from StartupBus sponsor Xero and shared office space in San Francisco’s pariSoma.

There was some confusion as the judges announced the winners in a conference room at the Austin Hilton hotel, since they referred to the victors by their hometowns: New York and Silicon Valley.

The New York contingent immediately exploded in celebration, but WalkIN members clapped cautiously: There were two teams from Silicon Valley in the finals, the other being FlyByMiles. When the judges finally disambiguated and crowned WalkIN the co-winner, our team became a swarming cloud of arms and faces.

“When we were talking on the bus,” said WalkIN iPhone developer Jared Hanson, “there was a definite energy.” He claims he had a feeling we would win the whole time, which was news to me.